NORTHAMPTON - Several area women, including Anna Daniele, owner of La Fiorentina Pastry Shop, are featured in the recently published book, "Daughters, Dads and the Path through Grief: Tales from Italian America."

The book is co-authored by Northampton resident Lorraine Mangione, who holds a doctorate in psychology and teaches at the New Hampshire campus of Antioch New England, and Donna H. DiCello, a licensed clinical psychologist who teaches at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven.

Other area women among the several dozen featured include retired Springfield College psychology professor Laura Maggio, and Verna Ledoux, who has been administrative assistant at the college's School of Social Work

Mangione said the book is "based on interviews we did with Italian American women, mostly in the Northeast, who have lost their fathers, and it covers the whole trajectory of the relationship from childhood until after the father's death."

"Although parts of it are definitely sad, or complicated, it is ultimately a celebration of the father daughter relationship, the importance of culture, and the bonds that remain even after death," Mangione said.

She was asked further about her desire to co-author the book that is available on Amazon. It is also availabe at Broadside Books, 247 Main St.

Why a book on Italian women and their dads?

As Italian American women, and as psychologists, we knew that there was very little written about fathers and daughters in psychology, and virtually nothing written on the father-daughter relationship in Italian American culture where the focus usually has been on the mother and her central place in the family.

Psychology's focus on daughters and dads has, until recently, centered on negative and psychologically harmful aspects of that relationship. And although many other disciplines and fields, such as sociology, history, and literature, study the Italian American experience, psychology has had little to say about it. We appreciate that psychology has taken "culture" seriously in some situations, and we wanted to extend that to Italian Americans.

While our book is ultimately about how daughters deal with their fathers' deaths, it is also about the richness and complexity of the entire relationship. Both of us had been very close to our dads, and felt their influence and support throughout our childhoods, as well as when we became women and psychologists. We knew what our experiences were like, but of course we wanted to hear from other women and see what their relationship had been like with their dad and what they felt and thought when he died.

How did you select the women?

We sent calls for participants to many listservs and organizations that would be in touch with Italian American women, and put notices up in bakeries, stores, and social clubs in Italian American areas around New England and New York. We also contacted a few women on our own or through colleagues, such as U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro from New Haven, or Helen Barolini, often considered the leader of Italian American women's literature.

We wanted to do the interviews in person, so we focused on the Northeast, although it turned out that we did have a few participants from further away with whom we had phone interviews. The Calandra Institute, which is part of Queens College of City University of New York, the Dante Alighieri Society in Cambridge, and a couple of the Italian clubs in the Albany area gave us many of our participants. So this was a self-selected sample, not a random sample of all dads and daughters.

Our criteria included that the women not have been abandoned or abused by their fathers, and that they were over 21 at the time of the interview. The response to the call for participants was overwhelming – we could not interview everyone who wanted to tell her story!

This response validated our hunch that there was a story out there to be told. We interviewed 51 Italian American women, from ages 33 through 86, a sample of women from many backgrounds and walks of life including several artists and writers, about their relationships with their fathers and the loss of their fathers.

We learned of deep and rich relationships that were not always easy or smooth, and certainly we heard about conflict, but overall we heard many, many heartfelt and inspiring stories of love and loss. Their honesty was amazing, and their willingness to open their hearts and homes to us was very humbling. Not only that, they fed us as well. Each father-daughter relationship had its own beauty, uniqueness, and poignancy, and we hope that that is conveyed throughout the book.

What are some of the insights they offer in terms of both grief and their relationships to their fathers?

Their fathers were clearly central to their lives, and they saw their fathers as their major champions and supporters, for the most part. While there was certainly conflict and disagreement in some of the relationships, most of the women and their fathers had worked through tough times and were quite close. A few had not, and those stories are extremely valuable to pass on to others. It gave us a whole new respect for the value of this relationship.

They really validated what is called the "continuing bonds" view of loss, which means that the relationship does not end at death, that the relationship continues to be important and continues to be reworked. We felt we saw that over and over.

The intertwining of grief, memorializing, and the creative process for the women who are artists, writers or poets carries the women through their grief toward some kind of meaning for themselves and also for their readers or viewers who have lost someone. Many people who are not artists do this in similar ways as they process their feelings, but we saw in these women the centrality of the role of creativity in the grief process.

Grief doesn't have a timetable or a set of stages or a prescribed way to unfold. And when grieving, it is really OK to be sad, conflicted, angry, in denial, or even lost, at various times within the process, to take breaks from the grief, and to go to therapy if necessary.

One of the most surprising things we learned was that no matter how long ago their fathers had died, the quality of their memories was very clear and tender, even if they were describing difficulties, and the feelings were strong and sincere.

How do their insights reflect what you anticipated? How are they different, and how do their experiences reflect on their Italian heritage?

We did not enter into this work with a rigidly formulated set of expectations, but rather we entered with a set of exploratory questions and ideas that seemed critical to us. We wanted to know the whole relationship, from childhood until after death. We wanted to know what the relationship felt like, and how it influenced the women. We wanted to know the impact of the father's death on the daughters. We wanted to know what felt "Italian" in all this.

What we heard were intimate and meaningful stories of real relationships, from warm and close childhood experiences to sometimes conflictual years during young adulthood to the later years of the older father and daughter. We heard of playing and learning together, feeling valued and loved, moving apart and moving closer. The examples and stories spoke to us with a depth and clarity as we sat with the women who had lived out these relationships.

Probably one of the more unexpected parts of our research and the book, and something that many readers have mentioned, is the portrayal of Italian American men as real live human beings, with all their strengths and challenges, and not the product of stereotyping, Hollywood, or television series. The fathers are truly inspirational.

We were treated to the Italian American experience in nuanced, multi-faceted examples. We heard about fathers who worked hard and dreamed big, who generously gave to their families and their communities, who wanted their daughters to get an education, who could be really strict and "over-protective."

We could almost see and taste the family gatherings, the cooking and food and talking, the tomatoes from the garden, perhaps with opera in the background. Religion and spirituality, mysticism and dreams, and values and beliefs reflected the Italian heritage and had an impact on their experience of their father's death and their grief.

We think that the ways in which death is experienced in Italian American culture might inform how bereavement is viewed in this country, which typically takes the stance that loss should be "gotten over" quickly. For Italians, death is often viewed as a more organic part of life, and relationships transcend both life and death. It lends support to the more contemporary thinking on grief regarding the idea of continuing bonds – that we don't need to sever our ties to the deceased, but rather reconfigure their place in our minds and hearts.

We heard how the women in our book did this time and time again. It is not what mainstream culture expects from us in our mourning. We like to quote family therapist and editor Joe Giordano (pdf) and his collaborators who wrote that "Italians tend to keep their dead with them." That just may be a better way to live through loss for many people.

Who is the book aimed at?

While the book is aimed at the "baby boomer" generation, there were also much younger women who participated in our study, so we see it as potentially working well for women of many ages. Basically the book is for any woman who has lost her dad either recently or a while ago, and who can use this to help her travel the path through grief. There are exercises at the end of each section of the book to help on that path.

It is also for any women who wants to understand her relationship with her dad in its depth and complexity, whether he is still alive or not. Dads who want to understand better what it means to be a father throughout the lifespan, and come to appreciate their significance in a daughter's life, can also find meaning and learn from the book.

What kind of feedback have you gotten so far?

One of the most exciting pieces of feedback has been that the book "works" for many different groups, and some readers have particularly noted that their cultural and religious backgrounds as Irish, Indians, Jews, Polish, Lithuanians, and "mixed" fit in just as well as Italian, although the food stories might be a bit different. And that it works for women whose fathers are still very much alive.

Men who are fathers have let us know that they resonate with what we have written and they are glad to see something that allows for real human beings as fathers, rather than villains or heroes.

How does heritage effect grief in both good and bad ways?

It can provide a framework and support system for helping the grieving person navigate their loss. Certain cultural grief rituals can be very important in processing such a loss. On the other hand, it may not take into consideration that there are many ways to grieve, and it may not take more idiosyncratic viewpoints into consideration. There are many layers to relationships and layers to grieving, and culture is one of those very meaningful layers.